What does it mean to live as a minority “at home”? How do non-titular populations navigate political systems designed to secure a comfortable majority? And under what conditions can minorities exercise meaningful democratic agency?
In this episode of Studio Central and Eastern Europe, Peter Vermeersch, Professor of Political Science at KU Leuven, speaks with Professor Zsuzsa Csergő, Professor of Nationalism and Democracy Studies at Queen’s University in Canada. A leading scholar of nationalism and minority politics, Csergő reflects on her long-standing research into the tensions between nation-building and democratic pluralism in Central and Eastern Europe, alongside her current work on resilient minorities and the Minority Institutions Database.
At the heart of the conversation is what Csergő terms the “minority condition”: a persistent positionality that shapes how individuals and communities relate to the state. Rather than viewing minorities as guests in a host country, she reframes them as “homeland minorities”—populations rooted in place, yet often denied full recognition. This shift opens onto deeper questions of historicity, language rights, and the criteria by which belonging is politically acknowledged.
Drawing on comparative insights—from Hungarian and Polish minorities to Russian-speakers in the Baltic states—Csergő outlines four key structural axes that shape minority life: numbers, place, time, and status. These dimensions, she argues, define the resources and constraints within which minorities organise, sustain cultural institutions, and pursue collective goals.
The discussion invites listeners to rethink the democratic stakes of diversity, and the subtle, ongoing labour required to inhabit it.
Peter Vermeersch: Hello, everyone. You're listening to the podcast of Studio Central Eastern Europe of the KU Leuven. In our 20-minute episodes, we discuss the latest research on the region. I'm Peter Vermeersch, professor at KU Leuven, and with me today is Zsuzsa Csergo. Zsuzsa is professor of nationalism and democracy studies in the Department of Political Studies at Queen's University in Canada.
She specializes in the study of nationalism and contemporary challenges to democracy, with a particular expertise on Central and Eastern Europe. Zsuzsa's research contributes to the understanding of tensions between nationalism and democracy in multiethnic societies, and she is the author of many books and articles, among them, Talk of the Nation: Language and Conflict in Romania and Slovakia from 2007, Cornell University Press.
And currently, she is working on the topic of resilient minorities and sources of minority democratic agency in majoritarian states based on comparative research in Central and Eastern Europe. And she's also leading the Minority Institutions Database. So, lots to talk about. Zsuzsa, welcome to the studio.
Zsuzsa Csergo: Thank you for the invitation, Peter. I'm delighted to be here.
Peter Vermeersch: Let's talk about the focus of your research, ethnolinguistic minorities in Central Europe. Could you explain a little bit how you came to this topic?
Zsuzsa Csergo: Yes, I'm happy to do that I think many of us, or maybe most of us who are doing research, especially empirical research are guided by some broader, larger question that motivates our research. And in my case, that has been the question of how persistent ethnic minorities seek political agency in majoritarian states. By majoritarian states, I mean states where the state center is engaged in majoritarian nation building, establishing policies, institutions to ensure that the mainstream culture, the core culture becomes dominant in the state. This is what the logic of the nation-building project has been: to create comfortable cultural majorities in states for reasons that have to do with legitimacy and all that. And it always leaves some people outside the mainstream. I focus on persistent ethnic minorities in the sense that these are minorities that are not just different from the mainstream because there are always all kinds of different reasons why people do not align with the mainstream. But these are ethnocultural minorities in the sense that they have something that creates a commonality, a shared culture that is different from the mainstream, from the core culture, and they want to maintain it.
Peter Vermeersch: And language is an important part of it, I suppose?
Zsuzsa Csergo: Language is an important part of it, not only in Central and Eastern Europe. But I think in Central and Eastern Europe, the boundary maker tends to be language. So, I think of language as well as ethnicity, race and religion and other forms of boundary making, cultural boundary making as theoretically equivalent in a sense. In most cases they are interrelated. But there's something about language that makes it easier for linguistic minorities to tell their own story to create some kind of cultural narrative that creates the boundary. This is also why I think language is important.
Peter Vermeersch: Could you give some examples of cases that you've been, working on extensively?
Zsuzsa Csergo: I'm a comparativist and, within that framework, I have been working primarily on Hungarian minorities. That's a language I speak, which makes it easier, obviously. I've been working on Hungarian minorities in Romania, Slovakia, recently I have also added Hungarians in Serbia. But about 15 years ago, I started doing research also on Russian speakers and Poles in the Baltic states.
Peter Vermeersch: Very important topics. When you research these minorities and you compare these cases, you look at what you call democratic agency. What do you mean by that? What is exactly the democratic agency in these linguistic minorities, in all these places?
Zsuzsa Csergo: Great question that I've been thinking about for many years. Political agency generally means that people have the capacity to have a say in the rules by which they live. And in majoritarian states where there is majoritarian nation-building, typically members of the core population, let's call them the majority members, have a sense of titularity in the state. That also means that they have a right within the boundaries of the state to have institutions in their language or in their culture, depending on what the boundary maker is. [As part of] the institutions that reflect their culture, in the case of linguistic minorities, there will always be schools in their language, culture institutions in their language, courts are going to be speaking their language, government at all levels is going be speaking their language. Whereas minorities have to demonstrate that they're worthy of it. This is what drives my research: the question of how minority members, persistent minority members, seek agency in this way.
Peter Vermeersch: I can imagine that it's different in various contexts. In Slovakia, let's say, the Hungarians have opportunities to have schools in Hungarian or libraries or cultural institutions in Hungarian, but it might be different for the Russian-speakers in the Baltic States.
Zsuzsa Csergo: Absolutely. And that is something else. I use this term that I think I may have coined, which is the minority condition, by which I mean that there is the persistent minority condition that makes people who live in this condition to see the state from a different angle. They look at the state from a different angle. It's a perspective matter because they are not titulars. They're constantly encountering that they are not titulars unless they assimilate individually. I'm talking about people who are not individually assimilated, but they want to keep speaking their language. They want to not just use it around the dinner table necessarily but also to live in the language where they live, develop their literature, their culture not just preserve some archaic culture. Those are interesting [cases]. Those are the minorities I'm thinking about.
Peter Vermeersch: I think it's important to stress that when we are speaking about these ethnolinguistic minorities in majoritarian states, that they still might feel attached to, or at home in, the state where they live.
Zsuzsa Csergo: Exactly.
Peter Vermeersch: It's not the case, or not always the case, I suppose, that they are connected to some external state. Is that correct?
Zsuzsa Csergo: Yes, it is, and that's again something that I like to emphasize. I use the term homeland minorities, homeland populations, because there has been a tendency to talk about such minorities as living in a host state. As if they're guests, not at home. And you have also done a lot of research on minorities and know that there is... there are debates about how historicity, the length of time that a population has been living in a place becomes a source of rights.
Peter Vermeersch: We're talking also in this context about migration in a certain sense. The minorities that you are talking about are typically not seen as immigrants. They're typically seen as longstanding members of the state.
Zsuzsa Csergo: Although one of the interesting comparisons or reasons to compare Russian-speakers in the Baltic states and more traditional, historic, established minorities, like Hungarians or Poles, in the region, is precisely that the Baltic states are majoritarian nation builders and do not look at them as homeland minorities. They are not considered even national minorities. The question of course arises, how much time do you need? How many generations have to live in a place to have rights to language use, for example?
Peter Vermeersch: Exactly, and it's also, I think, about the dominant self-understanding of the state and the population in that state. How diverse do they see themselves? How many languages do they think they can accommodate within their idea of being a nation?
Zsuzsa Csergo: Yes. And I have also found through this comparative work that the way the situation in which these minorities live can also be studied through patterns. I call them four axes of the minority condition. One of them is numbers, size matters. The other one is places in the sense of where they live and attachment to place -- how concentrated or dispersed they are, because that really shapes their ability, their capacity to create a social life and institutions, right?
Peter Vermeersch: Sort of regional concentration in one part of the country, for example.
Zsuzsa Csergo: Yes. Or if there may be a large number, in absolute numbers, like Russian speakers in Riga or Tallinn or Vilnius, even if the ratio is smaller there, they're more dispersed in the city. So even if there are cultural centers, it's much more difficult for them to reach them, whereas Russian speakers in, for example, Estonia's Narva region have easier access. These things matter. When parents have to take their kids to school and then to extracurricular- activities. There's numbers and place, and there's time, which we've mentioned -- the historicity, which also creates stories, narratives of attachment: they name the places, they name the river, they name the environment, surroundings around them. So time, and also status, recognition, political recognition, class… So these four structural axes create a different capacity and different resources.
Peter Vermeersch: Very interesting and a very rich field of political action from both the states and these minority representatives. Because, when you're talking about this democratic agency, you're also looking at the way they are organized politically, in political parties that represent the minority. Maybe also NGOs and other forms.
Zsuzsa Csergo: That's the agency part. I have mentioned the structural conditions within which these minority actors work. And then I also look at political actors, who are directly working, doing the politics, of seeking agency. And then there are the other, I call them intermediary actors. Those are who are leaders of cultural institutions, of schools, of organizations, media, minority media. And so, these are the actors who are doing the constant balancing work to do the intra-ethnic bonding activities that maintain, sustain a minority, and also create a space for a good life for a minority member, and the bridging activities toward the larger society. I call them constant balancers.
Peter Vermeersch: There's another dimension here that I want to discuss with you briefly, and that is when we're talking about minorities, as you describe them in Central Europe, a lot of people would associate it with let's call it political abuse. I can imagine, for example, that Russian-speakers in the Baltic states are the focus of attention from a lot of politicians within the Baltic states, but also from Russia. Hungarian-speakers outside of Hungary are, of course, very much in the focus of Hungarian nationalists. We've seen the Orbán regime very much focusing on that. Could you say something about the development of this, politically ‘using’ of the position of these minorities to advance certain political agendas.
Zsuzsa Csergo: This is one of the one of the sources of weakening democratic agency for minorities. Because these constant balancers, these minority actors have to work in at least four different fields: minority titular with the larger society in their home state, inter-minority, like for example, Hungarian minorities among each other. Hungarians and Roma Poles and Russians in Lithuanian. So, there's the inter-minority field, and then there's this consequential cross-border field. And in most of the cases that I study, there is a kin-state across the border where their ethnicity is the core, the majoritarian nation-building population. For Hungarians, of course, it's Hungary. For Russian-speakers, it's Russia. For the Poles it's Poland. Roma do not have that luxury. Or sometimes they do, if they identify as Hungarian Roma in Slovakia, for example. So sometimes they do, but they might not be accepted by the kin-state as a member of the community. There are those tensions as well. But my focus is on minority democratic agency, and I also look carefully at this cross-border field. I have done research on kin-state politics and so the instrumentalization of external kin has been one of the strategies that kin-state centers have been using, in many cases, for their own domestic purposes. Minorities, unfortunately, are caught between states in this sense, and they are vulnerable, made vulnerable to that, and some of them are co-opted by kin-state governments. Others resist, but it's one of the challenges that minority actors face if they want to create democratic agency.
Peter Vermeersch: Very interesting. It's an intricate field of connections and dynamics and influences. What is for you the most important case that you've worked on recently? Maybe not most important in the political sense, but one that captured your attention.
Zsuzsa Csergo: I have focused quite a bit on Hungarians in Romania and also on Russian-speakers in Estonia. From the region, these are the two cases on which I have done the most, extensive research. And there are personal reasons for why I'm interested in Hungarians in Romania, because I came from there. I have an insider-outsider advantage – or disadvantage, I don't know. And Russian speakers in Estonia, because that was my first research site. I was invited to give a talk, and I started making contacts and talking to people, and I became really interested.
Peter Vermeersch: And in the current geopolitical context, in the current sphere of tension that exists around, let's say, the eastern border of the EU, the Russian-speakers in Estonia, are, becoming even a more important case than a few years ago.
Zsuzsa Csergo: One of the things that is part of the minority condition is that there is constant built-in securitization, even if there is no kin-state from the majority perspective. I mentioned earlier that the way I look at the logic of, and goals of nation-making, nation-building is to create a comfortable majority in the state. If there are minorities that are perceived as potential challengers for whatever reason, that's a source of what we call with co-authors a titular insecurity. An ontological insecurity of those who feel that they are the titular owners of the state, the core, the majority. And if there are small minorities that do not count that much because they are disorganized, they are small, they don't have any resources or support from abroad and all that's okay, but if they do... So there is a built-in securitization which is not constantly there, but it can be activated.
Peter Vermeersch: And then people feel threatened by the minority.
Zsuzsa Csergo: Exactly. Just the existence of a minority can be [seen as a threat]. Of course, the majority is no single block of people thinking the same thing.
Peter Vermeersch: Of course not.
Zsuzsa Csergo: In general, there are patterns of fear that can be generated by their nationalist populist leaders.
Peter Vermeersch: And can be instrumentalized.
Zsuzsa Csergo: That's right.
Peter Vermeersch: Thank you very much, Zsusza, for sketching this interesting research topic in a very rich field of research. And you will continue, I think, in the coming years to do a lot more case studies in this comparative context. Thank you very much for speaking to us about your work.
Zsuzsa Csergo: My pleasure.
